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Interesting Progression

Often in church services I find music distracting and/or boring. Part of this is undoubtedly my own problems (which is outside the scope of this blog), but one reason may be that I frequently analyze the music too much.

Today we were at a service because Matt Brench was speaking/teaching there. Here’s a hymn we sang:

The last two chords are very surprising! Normally you expect the standard plagal “amen” cadence of IV I as a little tag (at the end of almost every hymn in the book). This one, harmonized by Bach, does something I’ve never seen before instead. After the standard V I progression in the key of C, we have a harmonic HALF cadence in the relative minor! Yes, that’s Am – E which follows a happy G7 – C. Very odd! I showed this to our resident amazing piano player, Larry Williams. He had never seen it before either!

Oh, wait! I just thought of something…

This COULD be a plagal cadence after all… a Picardy third plagal cadence in the key of Em! That would actually make more sense than a half cadence at the end of a song. I think I’m going to go with this for now.

Maybe you have a different opinion 🙂 I think Bach was feeling a little frisky that day, maybe he ate a hot pepper for lunch or something, and just wanted to be a little funky.

EDIT:

Matt Brench wrote me back today and posted this picture of the *exact* same cadence! It’s not even by Bach!

I also thought of something else it could be… a *borrowed* plagal cadence in the key of E (mediant). Borrowed iv chords are pretty common (even today)… so in other words:

C: V I E: *iv I

http://academic.udayton.edu/PhillipMagnuson/soundpatterns/chromaticIII/chromed.html

Ben Holt

March 30, 2013

That makes sense! Still, an Amen half cadence is really odd, and I stand by theory that Bach just had too much sugar in his tea or something that day.
Dcn. Brench

March 30, 2013

I didn’t have time to think about it when you pointed it out to me yesterday, but now you’ve mentioned it again, I think the half cadence makes more sense than what would essentially be a sudden key change to E minor.

The reason is that if you follow the phrases of the hymn, it centers around the key of A minor more regularly than C major. Even just looking at the accidentals, they’re all sharps, where C major would be likely to have some B-flats.

So my guess is that the whole hymn is actually in A minor, which happens to end with a Deceptive Cadence in the relative major (probably for lyric-matching reasons). Then the Amen half cadence ending matches the same mysterious minor-to-major play that went on in the body of the melody.

Music theory is fun!

Interesting Progression

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